From Michelle Pfeiffer to Bella Hadid, women have built clean fragrance houses around full ingredient disclosure over the past twelve years. Here’s what each one discloses, and why the newest launched this year.
“I went down the rabbit hole, and when deep diving into different fragrances, the EWG would always flag them a very high hazard,” Michelle Pfeiffer told Vogue about the years she spent poring over the Environmental Working Group’s ingredient database. She had stopped wearing perfume entirely after that discovery in 2004, unwilling to spray something onto her skin whose full formula she couldn’t see. It took roughly a decade of development, several rejections, and an eventual partnership with International Flavors & Fragrances before she launched Henry Rose in 2019, a fine fragrance line built on full ingredient disclosure.
Pfeiffer’s frustration wasn’t unique to an actress with the resources to commission her own lab work. It pointed to a gap the fragrance industry had left wide open. “Fragrance is a notoriously mysterious industry,” Debi Theis, president of Henry Rose, previously told Ethos. “Formula and ingredient lists are considered trade secrets, and therefore aren’t required to be disclosed.” A single listing, Theis said, can obscure as many as 3,000 possible components. “We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality for safety,” she said.
That same tension between safety and sensory pleasure has driven a wave of women to found their own fragrance houses over the past decade. Bee Shapiro, a longtime beauty journalist before she started Ellis Brooklyn in 2014, wanted scents that held up to scrutiny without smelling clinical. “I just started out saying to myself, I want different kinds of scents, like a scent that actually wears beautifully throughout the day, warms to your skin,” she told WWD. “I wanted scents that use safer ingredients.”
Independent perfume sales grew 46.3 percent year over year, more than four times the rate of conglomerate-owned brands, and two of the newest women-founded houses launched within the past two years. What separates this generation of founders from the clean beauty boom that preceded them is a refusal to treat safety and quality as a trade-off. Each built a business on the premise that a fragrance could be fully disclosed and still carry the depth and complexity of a proper signature scent.
The best women-founded clean fragrance houses
From a former actress turned formulator to a fashion-world creative director rebuilding a stalled label, these are the women-led houses pairing full ingredient disclosure with real nuance, depth, and a little bit of drama in a bottle.
Henry Rose
Best for full ingredient transparency. Pfeiffer spent a decade researching before Henry Rose launched in 2019 as a genderless, 100 percent ingredient-transparent line, publishing every component down to the parts per million. Its perfumers work within a restricted, EWG-vetted palette of fewer than 400 approved ingredients, choosing lab-made molecules over natural ones whenever the synthetic version is gentler on sensitive skin.
Maison Louis Marie
Best for botanical, old-world perfumery. Marie du Petit Thouars, a descendant of the French botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit Thouars, founded the Brooklyn label with her husband in 2013, drawing on childhood memories of the outdoors. “I grew up in nature. I need nature. If I don’t have it, I don’t feel well,” she said. She’s candid that natural ingredients aren’t automatically the safer or more sustainable choice. “Sometimes you think that natural is better, but it’s just not,” she said, favoring nature-identical synthetics over raw materials like animal-derived musk, and building each fragrance slowly around a specific memory rather than a market trend.
Orebella
Hadid has described Orebella less as a product line than a record of her own life. “‘Ôrəbella is basically my memory library in scent form,” she told Wonderland Magazine. “Every fragrance comes from something real whether it’s my childhood, nature, love, healing.” The brand bans more than 1,300 ingredients, including alcohol, parabens, sulfates, and phthalates, and holds Leaping Bunny and PETA certifications for cruelty-free and vegan formulation.
Annual Leave
Tran and Mascarell spent years inside luxury perfumery before deciding a summer scent deserved a second life. Their debut, Summer Vol. 1, was made in a run of 1,000 units, funded with $30,000 of their own money spent on jasmine sambac and osmanthus absolutes rather than marketing. “It’s not niche. It’s a very approachable scent, created with beautiful ingredients and that texture you want to see in fine fragrance,” Mascarell told Beauty Independent.
Phlur
Phlur launched in 2015 as one of the first brands to list its fragrance ingredients openly, co-founded by Cynthia Korman alongside her husband, Eric. After the label stalled, the creative director Chriselle Lim acquired and relaunched it in 2021, pairing that same transparency with a more personal, story-driven approach.
Ellis Brooklyn
Best for elevated, wearable scents. Shapiro built her Brooklyn-based line around elevated fragrances, rather than austere, pushing back on what she has described as an outdated idea of clean beauty as a passing trend rather than a baseline expectation. The house has since extended that scrutiny beyond the bottle, examining where its paper stock, caps, and raw materials like sandalwood and rose oil are actually sourced.
Skylar
Cat Chen started Skylar in 2017 after her newborn daughter reacted to the fragrance Chen wore every day, sending her searching for a hypoallergenic option that didn’t smell like one. Starco Brands, the consumer products company led by chief executive Ross Sklar, acquired Skylar in January 2023, and in 2025 named the Love Island USA alum Leah Kateb as chief creative officer — a role the brand is calling “refounder” — to lead what it describes as Skylar’s next era.
DedCool
Carina Chaz started DedCool out of her college dorm room in 2016, when green beauty was still a niche interest rather than an expectation. “The concept came to me as a lover of fragrance and someone who cared about green beauty, which wasn’t quite a hot topic in 2016,” she told Glossy. The line has since grown into a full wardrobe of layerable scents.
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